Nikita Khrushchev - Cold War - HISTORY.com Nikita Khrushchev A+E Networks Introduction Nikita Khrushchev (1894-1971) led the Soviet Union during the height of the Cold War, serving as premier from 1958 to 1964. Though he largely pursued a policy of peaceful coexistence with the West, he instigated the Cuban Missile Crisis by placing nuclear weapons 90 miles from Florida. At home, he initiated a process of “de-Stalinization” that made Soviet society less repressive. Yet Khrushchev could be authoritarian in his own right, crushing a revolt in Hungary and approving the construction of the Berlin Wall. Known for his colorful speeches, he once took off and brandished his shoe at the United Nations. Google Nikita Khrushchev: The Early Years Khrushchev was born on April 15, 1894, in Kalinovka, a small Russian village near the Ukrainian border. At age 14 he moved with his family to the Ukrainian mining town of Yuzovka, where he apprenticed as a metalworker and performed other odd jobs.

Despite his religious upbringing, Khrushchev joined the communist Bolsheviks in 1918, more than a year after they had seized power in the Russian Revolution . During the subsequent Russian Civil War, Khrushchev’s first wife, with whom he had two children, died of typhus. He later remarried and had four more children. Did You Know? During the “kitchen debate” of 1959, so named because it took place in a model kitchen set up for a trade exhibition in Moscow, Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev told U.S. Vice President Richard Nixon, “Let’s compete. Who can produce the most goods for the people, that system is better and it will win.” In 1929 Khrushchev moved to Moscow, where he steadily rose through the Communist Party ranks. Eventually he entered the inner circle of Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin , who by that time had consolidated control over the country and instituted a bloody purge of perceived enemies. Millions of people were killed or imprisoned in Gulag labor camps, and millions more died in famines brought on by the forced collectivization of agriculture.

Khrushchev Takes Over for Stalin During World War II , Khrushchev mobilized troops to fight Nazi Germany in the Ukraine and at Stalingrad. After the war, he helped to rebuild the devastated countryside while simultaneously stifling Ukrainian nationalist dissent. By the time Stalin died in March 1953, Khrushchev had positioned himself as a possible successor. Six months later, he became head of the Communist Party and one of the most powerful people in the USSR. At first, Khrushchev and other high-ranking officials ruled through a form of collective leadership. But in 1955 he organized the ouster of Premier Georgi Malenkov and replaced him with an ally, Nikolai Bulganin. Khrushchev foiled a Malenkov-led coup attempt in June 1957 and took over the premiership the following March. Khrushchev Begins the De-Stalinization Process Once a loyal Stalinist, Khrushchev gave a long speech in February 1956 that criticized Stalin for arresting and deporting opponents, for elevating himself above the party and for incompetent wartime leadership, among other things.

This withering, albeit incomplete, indictment of Stalin was supposed to remain secret. By that June, however, the U.S. State Department had published the complete text. Starting in 1957, Khrushchev made some minor attempts to rehabilitate Stalin’s image. But he switched course once again in 1961, when the city of Stalingrad was renamed and Stalin’s remains were removed from Lenin’s mausoleum in Moscow’s Red Square . Emboldened by Khrushchev’s so-called “secret speech,” protestors took to the streets in the Soviet satellites of Poland and Hungary. The Polish revolt was resolved fairly peacefully, but the Hungarian revolt was violently suppressed with troops and tanks. In all, at least 2,500 Hungarians were killed in late 1956, and about 13,000 were wounded. Many more fled to the West, and others were arrested or deported. On the domestic front, Khrushchev worked—not always successfully—to increase agricultural production and raise living standards.

He also reduced the power of the Soviet Union’s feared secret police, released many political prisoners, relaxed artistic censorship, opened up more of the country to foreign visitors and inaugurated the space age in 1957 with the launch of the satellite Sputnik. Two years later, a Soviet rocket hit the moon, and in 1961 Soviet astronaut Yuri A. Gagarin became the first man in space. Khrushchev’s Relationship With Foreign Leaders Khrushchev had a complicated relationship with the West. A fervent believer in communism, he nonetheless preferred peaceful coexistence with capitalist countries. Unlike Stalin, he even visited the United States. Relations between the two superpowers deteriorated somewhat in 1960 when the Soviets shot down an American U-2 spy plane deep inside their territory. The following year, Khrushchev approved the construction of the Berlin Wall in order to stop East Germans from fleeing to capitalist West Germany. Cold War tensions reached a high point in October 1962 when the United States discovered Soviet nuclear missiles stationed in Cuba.

The world appeared to be on the brink of nuclear conflict, but, after a 13-day standoff, Khrushchev agreed to remove the weapons. In return, U.S. President John F. Kennedy , who one year earlier had authorized the failed Bay of Pigs invasion, publicly consented not to attack Cuba. Kennedy also privately agreed to take American nuclear weapons out of Turkey. In July 1963, the United States, the United Kingdom and the Soviet Union negotiated a partial nuclear test ban. One of the sharpest thorns in Khrushchev’s side was fellow communist Mao Zedong , the leader of China. Starting around 1960, the two sides engaged in an increasingly vindictive war of words, with Khrushchev calling Mao a “left revisionist” who failed to comprehend modern warfare. The Chinese, meanwhile, criticized Khrushchev as a “psalm-singing buffoon” who underestimated the nature of Western imperialism.

Khrushchev’s Fall From Power The break with China and food shortages in the USSR eroded Khrushchev’s legitimacy in the eyes of other high-ranking Soviet officials, who were already bothered by what they saw as his erratic tendency to undercut their authority. In October 1964 Khrushchev was called back from a vacation in Pitsunda, Georgia , and forced to resign as both premier and head of the Communist Party. Khrushchev wrote his memoirs and quietly lived out the remainder of his days before dying of a heart attack in September 1971. Nonetheless, his spirit of reform lived on during the perestroika era of the 1980s. Tags Nikita Khrushchev Nikita Khrushchev Primary Sources Nikita Khrushchev, the grandson of a serf and the son of a coal miner, was born in Kalinovka, Ukraine on 5th April, 1894. After a brief formal education Khrushchev found work as a pipe fitter in Yuzovka.

During the First World War Khrushchev became involved in trade union activities and after the October Revolution joined the Bolsheviks . In January, 1919, Khrushchev joined the Red Army and fought against the Whites in the Ukraine during the Civil War . After leaving the army he returned to Yuzovka where he returned to school to finish his education. Khrushchev remained active in the Communist Party and in 1925 was employed as party secretary of the Petrovsko-Mariinsk. Lazar Kaganovich , the general-secretary of the Ukrainian Communist Party, was impressed with Khrushchev and invited him to accompany him to the 14th Party Congress in Moscow. With the support of Kaganovich, Khrushchev made steady progress in the party hierarchy. In 1938 Khrushchev became secretary of the Ukrainian Communist Party and was employed by Joseph Stalin to carry out the Great Purge in the Ukraine. The following year he became a full member of the Politburo.

Khrushchev and Stalin Khrushchev was aware that he had to be very careful in his dealings with Stalin: "Even though I agreed with Stalin completely, I knew I had to watch my step in answering him. One of Stalin's favourite tricks was to provoke you into making a statement - or even agreeing with a statement - which showed your true feelings about someone else. It was perfectly clear to me that Stalin and Beria were very close. To what extent this friendship was sincere, I couldn't say, but I knew it was no accident that Beria had been Stalin's choice for Yezhov's replacement." Khrushchev also worked closely with Lavrenti Beria . "Beria and I started to see each other frequently at Stalin's. At first I liked him. We had friendly chats and even joked together quite a lot, but gradually his political complexion came clearly into focus. I was shocked by his sinister, two-faced, scheming hypocrisy." Second World War After the invasion of Poland in 1940 Khrushchev was given the responsibility of suppressing the Polish and Ukrainian nationalists.

When the German Army invaded the Soviet Union in June, 1941, Khrushchev arranged the evacuation of much of the region's industry. During the Second World War Khrushchev granted the rank lieutenant general, and was given the task of organizing guerrilla warfare in the Ukraine against the Germans. When the German Army retreated in 1944 Khrushchev was once again placed in control of the Ukraine and the rebuilding of the region. Khrushchev job was made more difficult by the famine of 1946. This brought him into conflict with Joseph Stalin who accused Khrushchev of concentrating too much on feeding the people living of the Ukraine rather than exporting food to the rest of the Soviet Union. Khrushchev was demoted in 1951 and replaced as the minister responsible for agriculture. On the death of Joseph Stalin in 1953, Gregory Malenkov became both prime minister and head of the Communist Party. He appeared to be a reformer and called for a higher priority to be given to consumer goods. He later argued that he was not fully aware of the crimes committed by Stalin: "I still mourned Stalin as an extraordinary powerful leader.

I knew that his power had been exerted arbitrarily and not always in the proper direction, but in the main Stalin's strength, I believed, had still been applied to the reinforcement of Socialism and to the consolidation of the gains of the October Revolution. Stalin may have used methods which were, from my standpoint, improper or even barbaric, but I hadn't yet begun to challenge the very basis of Stalin's claim to a special honour in history. However, questions were beginning to arise for which I had no ready answer. Like others, I was beginning to doubt whether all the arrests and convictions had been justified from the standpoint of judicial norms. But then Stalin had been Stalin. Even in death he commanded almost unassailable authority, and it still hadn't occurred to me that he had been capable of abusing his power." First Secretary of the Communist Party In September, 1953, Khrushchev became first secretary of the Communist Party. He arranged for the execution of Lavrenti Beria , head of the Secret Police and gradually he gained control of the party machinery. In 1955 he joined with Nikolai Bulganin to oust Gregory Malenkov from power.

He also decided to condemn Stalin's period of rule in the Soviet Union. During the 20th Party Congress in February, 1956, Khrushchev launched an attack on the rule of Joseph Stalin . He argued: " Stalin acted not through persuasion, explanation and patient co-operation with people, but by imposing his concepts and demanding absolute submission to his opinion. Whoever opposed this concept or tried to prove his viewpoint, and the correctness of his position, was doomed to removal from the leading collective and to subsequent moral and physical annihilation. This was especially true during the period following the 17th Party Congress, when many prominent Party leaders and rank-and-file Party workers, honest and dedicated to the cause of communism, fell victim to Stalin's despotism." Khrushchev condemned the Great Purge and accused Stalin of abusing his power. During the speech he suggested that Stalin had ordered the assassination of Sergy Kirov . Later Khrushchev launched an investigation into the assassination of Kirov and other Stalin crimes.

However, according to one insider, Feliks Chuev , the Shvernik Commission "found nothing against Stalin" but "Khrushchev refused to publish it - it was of no use to him." In the summer of 1956 Gregory Malenkov , Nikolai Bulganin , Vyacheslav Molotov and Lazar Kaganovich attempted to oust Khrushchev This was unsuccessful and Khrushchev now purged his opponents in the Communist Party. Mikhail Gorbachev was one of those who supported Khrushchev's actions: "Khrushchev's secret speech at the XXth Party Congress caused a political and psychological shock throughout the country. At the Party krai committee I had the opportunity to read the Central Committee information bulletin, which was practically a verbatim report of Khrushchev's words. I fully supported Khrushchev's courageous step. I did not conceal my views and defended them publicly.

But I noticed that the reaction of the apparatus to the report was mixed; some people even seemed confused." De-Stalinzation Khrushchev's de-Stalinzation policy encouraged people living in Eastern Europe to believe that he was willing to give them more independence from the Soviet Union. In Hungary the prime minister Imre Nagy removed state control of the mass media and encouraged public discussion on political and economic reform. Nagy also released anti-communists from prison and talked about holding free elections and withdrawing Hungary from the Warsaw Pact . Khrushchev became increasingly concerned about these developments and on 4th November 1956 he sent the Red Army into Hungary . During the Hungarian Uprising an estimated 20,000 people were killed. Nagy was arrested and replaced by the Soviet loyalist, Janos Kadar . Imre Nagy was imprisoned and executed in 1958. In 1958 Khrushchev replaced Gregory Malenkov as prime minister and was now the undisputed leader of both state and party. In the Soviet Union he promoted reform of the Soviet system and began to place an emphasis on the production of consumer goods rather than on heavy industry.

Khrushchev eased censorship in the Soviet Union and allowed One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich , by Alexander Solzhenitsyn to be published. Some pointed out that this was part of his de-Stalinization policy and did not reflect a genuine increase in freedom. His critics pointed out that books such as Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak were still banned. In 1959 Khrushchev announced a change in foreign policy. In 1959 visited the United States and offered "the capitalist countries peaceful competition". Khrushchev was due to attend the Paris Summit Conference in 1960 when a reconnaissance plane was shot down over the Soviet Union. He cancelled the meeting and later that year at the Union Nations he attacked Western influence in the Congo. When John F. Kennedy replaced Dwight Eisenhower as president of the United States he was told about the CIA plan to invade Cuba . Kennedy had doubts about the venture but he was afraid he would be seen as soft on communism if he refused permission for it to go ahead. Kennedy's advisers convinced him that Castro was an unpopular leader and that once the invasion started the Cuban people would support the ClA-trained forces.

Khrushchev and Kennedy On April 14, 1961, B-26 planes began bombing Cuba's airfields. After the raids Cuba was left with only eight planes and seven pilots. Two days later five merchant ships carrying 1,400 Cuban exiles arrived at the Bay of Pigs . The attack was a total failure. Two of the ships were sunk, including the ship that was carrying most of the supplies. Two of the planes that were attempting to give air-cover were also shot down. Within seventy-two hours all the invading troops had been killed, wounded or had surrendered. At the beginning of September 1962, U-2 spy planes discovered that the Soviet Union was building surface-to-air missile (SAM) launch sites. There was also an increase in the number of Soviet ships arriving in Cuba which the United States government feared were carrying new supplies of weapons. President Kennedy complained to the Soviet Union about these developments and warned them that the United States would not accept offensive weapons (SAMs were considered to be defensive) in Cuba. On September 27, a CIA agent in Cuba overheard Castro's personal pilot tell another man in a bar that Cuba now had nuclear weapons.

U-2 spy-plane photographs also showed that unusual activity was taking place at San Cristobal. However, it was not until October 15 that photographs were taken that revealed that the Soviet Union was placing long range missiles in Cuba. President Kennedy's first reaction to the information about the missiles in Cuba was to call a meeting to discuss what should be done. Fourteen men attended the meeting and included military leaders, experts on Latin America, representatives of the CIA, cabinet ministers and personal friends whose advice Kennedy valued. This group became known as the Executive Committee of the National Security Council. Over the next few days they were to meet several times. At the first meeting of the Executive Committee of the National Security Council, the CIA and other military advisers explained the situation. After hearing what they had to say, the general feeling of the meeting was for an air-attack on the missile sites. Remembering the poor advice the CIA had provided before the Bay of Pigs invasion, John F. Kennedy decided to wait and instead called for another meeting to take place that evening. By this time several of the men were having doubts about the wisdom of a bombing raid, fearing that it would lead to a nuclear war with the Soviet Union.

The committee was now so divided that a firm decision could not be made. Cuban Missile Crisis The Executive Committee of the National Security Council argued amongst themselves for the next two days. The CIA and the military were still in favour of a bombing raid and/or an invasion. However, the majority of the committee gradually began to favour a naval blockade of Cuba. Kennedy accepted their decision and instructed Theodore Sorensen , a member of the committee, to write a speech in which Kennedy would explain to the world why it was necessary to impose a naval blockade of Cuba. As well as imposing a naval blockade, Kennedy also told the air-force to prepare for attacks on Cuba and the Soviet Union. The army positioned 125,000 men in Florida and was told to wait for orders to invade Cuba. If the Soviet ships carrying weapons for Cuba did not turn back or refused to be searched, a war was likely to begin. Kennedy also promised his military advisers that if one of the U-2 spy planes were fired upon he would give orders for an attack on the Cuban SAM missile sites. The world waited anxiously. A public opinion poll in the United States revealed that three out of five people expected fighting to break out between the two sides.

There were angry demonstrations outside the American Embassy in London as people protested about the possibility of nuclear war. Demonstrations also took place in other cities in Europe. However, in the United States, polls suggested that the vast majority supported Kennedy's action. On October 24, President John F. Kennedy was informed that Soviet ships had stopped just before they reached the United States ships blockading Cuba. That evening Khrushchev sent an angry note to Kennedy accusing him of creating a crisis to help the Democratic Party win the forthcoming election. On October 26, Khrushchev sent Kennedy another letter. In this he proposed that the Soviet Union would be willing to remove the missiles in Cuba in exchange for a promise by the United States that they would not invade Cuba. The next day a second letter from Khrushchev arrived demanding that the United States remove their nuclear bases in Turkey. While the president and his advisers were analyzing Khrushchev's two letters, news came through that a U-2 plane had been shot down over Cuba. The leaders of the military, reminding Kennedy of the promise he had made, argued that he should now give orders for the bombing of Cuba.

Kennedy refused and instead sent a letter to Khrushchev accepting the terms of his first letter. Khrushchev agreed and gave orders for the missiles to be dismantled. Eight days later the elections for Congress took place. The Democrats increased their majority and it was estimated that Kennedy would now have an extra twelve supporters in Congress for his policies. The Cuban Missile Crisis was the first and only nuclear confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union. The event appeared to frighten both sides and it marked a change in the development of the Cold War . The Military and the leaders of the Communist Party felt humiliated by Khrushchev climbdown over Cuba. His agricultural policy was also a failure and the country was forced to import increasing amounts of wheat from Canada and the United States. On 14th October, 1964, the Central Committee forced Khrushchev to resign. He lived in retirement in Moscow where he wrote his memoirs, Khrushchev Remembers (1971). Nikita Khrushchev died on 11th September, 1971.

Biography: Nikita Khrushchev Nikita Khrushchev (1894-1971) First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union 1953-1964. Certainly the most colorful Soviet leader, Khrushchev is best remembered for his dramatic, oftentimes boorish gestures and "harebrained schemes" designed to attain maximum propaganda effect, his enthusiastic belief that Communism would triumph over capitalism, and the fact that he was the only Soviet leader ever to be removed peacefully from office--a direct result of the post-Stalin thaw he had instigated in 1956. A miner who had joined the Bolsheviks in 1918, Khrushchev was able to receive a technical education thanks to the October Revolution and became a true believer in the benefits of the workers' state. Rising through the Party's ranks, he became a member of the Central Committee in 1934 and of the Politburo in 1939.

After Stalin's death in 1953, Khrushchev became the Party's First Secretary in the collective leadership that emerged after it had eliminated Lavrenti Beria and his faction. Subsequently, he used Stalin's established technique to divide and conquer his rivals, replace them with his own people, and emerge as the undisputed leader of the Soviet Union, with the difference that he did not kill these people, but had them assigned to such faraway and harmless posts as Ambassador to Mongolia. In 1956, at the 20th Congress of the Communist Party, Khrushchev stunned the delegates with his so-called "secret speech", during which he denounced the excesses of the Stalin era and Stalin's personality cult for six hours. Until the speech, it was still considered taboo to say anything negative about Stalin. Khrushchev's speech seems somewhat mild in hindsight, now that the scale of the horrors of the Great Purges and the Gulag are well known. At the time, however, his revelations (limited only to Stalin's crimes against the Party, not the country at large) were earth shattering.

Khrushchev honestly believed in the superiority of Communism, and felt that it was only a matter of time before it would destroy the Capitalist system once and for all. He set bold (and ultimately unattainable) goals of "overtaking the West" in food production, initiating massive programs to put vast tracts of virgin lands in Kazakhstan and Siberia under the plow with the help of thousands of urban Komsomol volunteers who brought little but their enthusiasm with them to the open steppes. Despite being hailed as an expert on agriculture, Khrushchev miscalculated when, after a trip to Iowa in 1959, he became a huge enthusiast of corn and decided to introduce it to his country, most of which has an unsuitable climate. On the industrial front, Khrushchev relaxed Stalin's emphasis on military production somewhat, resulting in a wider array of consumer goods and an improved standard of living for ordinary Soviet citizens. Another one of the achievements of Khrushchev's post-Stalin "thaw" was a relaxation of the political climate, in particular censorship.

"One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich", Solzhenitsyn's tale of life in the Gulag camps, was published in 1961 at Khrushchev's personal behest, and an entire dissident movement of writers and intellectuals appeared. While they were persecuted and had to function underground, this was still a major change, since any dissidents whatsoever simply would not have remained alive under Stalin. In foreign affairs, Khrushchev also enthusiastically set lofty but often-unattainable goals, and enjoyed dramatically snubbing the West. He flew to a summit in London in a half-completed prototype of a passenger jet to demonstrate the advanced state of Soviet aviation (duly impressing his hosts, who did not have a comparable plane yet at the time). Communism's appeal spread rapidly throughout the decolonizing countries of Asia, Africa, and Latin America as the Soviet Union lavished aid for splashy projects such as dams and stadiums. The stunning propaganda coup scored by the Soviet Union in launching the first satellite, Sputnik, was followed by greater and greater achievements, such as the first dog, the first man, and the first woman in space.

Many in the West began to fear that the Soviets really were catching up and soon would overtake them. Khrushchev's enthusiasm for flashy gestures had not been liked by more conservative elements from the very start; many Soviets were greatly embarrassed by his antics, such as banging a shoe on the podium during a speech to the UN General Assembly. There were elements in the Party who were actively looking for an opportunity to oust him. Their opportunity came with the Cuban Missile Crisis. In yet another case of showmanship that he was unable to back up with deeds, in 1962 Khrushchev deployed nuclear missiles in newly Communist Cuba, within easy striking distance of most major American population centers. Thanks to intelligence received from Oleg Penkovsky, a Soviet double agent, the United States was aware that the missiles were still only partially developed and did not pose an immediate threat. President John Kennedy called Khrushchev's bluff, and the latter was forced to remove the missiles from Cuba, with great loss of face both at home and abroad. Khrushchev never regained his prestige after the incident, and was quietly ousted two years later by opponents in the Politburo--significantly, with no bloodshed.

He spent the rest of his life in peaceful retirement, and was the only Soviet leader not to be buried in the Kremlin wall after his death. Lost Khrushchev | Nina Khrushcheva Nina Khrushcheva Search: Lost Khrushchev I am very proud of my name. It is my grandfather’s — Nikita Khrushchev. Here I am with my grandfather in 1971, in his retirement home in Petrovo Dalnee, 30 miles west of Moscow. There is just one problem with having this last name: Often people don’t talk to me, they talk to Khrushchev, the late Soviet premier. At times I become only a prop for their ideological idiosyncrasies or historical memories, like those cardboard figures — Nixon, Clinton or Schwarzenegger — that you take pictures with at an amusement park. Of course, I don’t object to being a professional Khrushchev once in a while. Responsibility comes with the name, and I am lucky to have it. Yet, also once in a while, anonymity is a welcome quality.

At times, I think it would have been liberating to have your name not known, not recognized, not mangled. It would be great to have a name less terrifyingly foreign (or communist) to the American ear. Ann (N) Kay (K) is a pseudonym I’d like to have. Unparalleled in its basic simplicity, it is great name to have on the cover of a best-selling silly love novel, sold in every supermarket. I want to write it, but I never will — my Russian upbringing was too intellectual for that. I may never use this pseudonym at all. But here Ann Kay may get a chance to test my alternative personality. Not that my personality isn’t alternative as it is. When I explain our multilayered family relations, people often get lost in its complexity. And I am, too, lost in trying to explain it clearly and succinctly. Russia after all is an enigma wrapped in mystery, and my family is no exception. Khrushchev, the Premier, is actually my biological great grandfather.

But when his eldest son, Leonid perished in a World War II air battle over central Russia, Nikita adopted Leonid’s two-year old daughter, my mother Julia, as his own. Julia, his granddaughter by birth, became his daughter by relations. Consequently, by relations Nikita Khrushchev is my grandfather, and I always refer to him as such. Photo Left: My grandfather and mother inspect arts and crafts during Soviet state visit to Indonesia in 1959. Photo Right: Leonid Khrushchev (1917-43) in Moscow during World War II, 1942. For his anti-Stalin reform policies the premier became persona-non-grata in the 1960s USSR around the time I was born. When I grew up, my political consciousness had grown too: In the early 1980s, with Leonid Brezhnev running the Soviet show, I myself decided to adopt Khrushchev. To show my affinity with my grandfather, I chose to give up my father’s surname, Petrov, and to take that of my mother’s, Khrushcheva.

My father Lev Petrov, second top right, was also a soldier in World War II. Pictured here in 1941, he was 18 when the war began. He passed away in 1970 at the age of 47, and it was a terrible loss for me as a small child. Yet growing up, I felt that he didn’t need as much of my public memory, as my grandfather did. However, since then, in homage to my father, I always use my middle initial – L – for Lvovna, my Russian patronymic based on his first name, Lev. Sometimes I want to go back to my old surname, but after 30 years Khrushcheva has become more than just my identification, it is my identity, too. Today Nina Petrova no longer exists. She was left in the USSR, the country that is also the thing of the past. So it is Ann Kay who may be an alter ego for my future projects. Although once discussing this with an editor I was stunned to hear that he would never publish me under this pseudonym. “The readers have no idea who that is,” he said.

“And we don’t want to disappoint our readers.” Indeed, we don’t, and for now I remain Nina L. Khrushcheva. As such I have written a memoir, The Lost Khrushchev (Tate Publishing, May 2014), the year of my grandfather’s 120th birth and 50th anniversary of his ousting from the Kremlin. It has taken four years to cohere this three-decades-coming-of-age story into a book. Rewriting it three times, probably the hardest thing I have ever done. I had to put together a somewhat comprehensible picture of Soviet history, to explain my grandfather’s reformist political legacy, despite his loyalty to Joseph Stalin before the dictator’s death in 1953. I had to address the rise of Vladimir Putin, and most importantly, I had to unravel deeply convoluted relations within the Khrushchev family. Synopsis The Lost Khrushchev: A Journey Into the Gulag of the Russian Mind is a family chronicle that tells the story of Leonid Khrushchev, my grandfather, and the oldest son of former Soviet premier, Nikita Khrushchev.

Part memoir, part investigation, this book is a window into Leonid’s life and death – and what they mean for contemporary Russia. It is inspired by the persistent accusations in the Russian media that 25-year-old Leonid – a fighter pilot during World War II, the Great Patriotic War in Russia – did not die heroically in battle in 1943 as was once presumed, but instead was executed by Joseph Stalin for his alleged service to the Nazis. So what happened to that lost Khrushchev? Was Leonid really a deserter? Or did he, like 20 million other Russians, lose his life during the war? Throughout this book, I also address the legacy of my great grandfather, Nikita Khrushchev, whose leadership from 1953 to 1964 still has much bearing on Russian politics today. In February 2013 I spoke about The Lost Khrushchev at my home university, The New School — it was a horrible blizzard that day, still didn’t stop almost 200 diehard downtown liberals and Cold Warriors from attending. I am grateful for their interest and attention. What does Khrushchev mean?

Definitions for Khrushchevˈkrʊʃ tʃɛf, -tʃɔf, ˈkruʃ- This page provides all possible meanings and translations of the word Khrushchev Princeton's WordNet(0.00 / 0 votes)Rate this definition: Khrushchev, Nikita Khrushchev, Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev(noun) Soviet statesman and premier who denounced Stalin (1894-1971) Wiktionary(0.00 / 0 votes)Rate this definition: Khrushchev(ProperNoun) English transliteration of the Russian surname u0425u0440u0443u0449u0451u0432 (Xruu0161u010Du00F3v). Freebase(0.00 / 0 votes)Rate this definition: Khrushchev Khrushchev: The Man and His Era is a 2003 biography of Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev.

Written by William Taubman, the book is the first in-depth and comprehensive American biography of Khrushchev. Taubman was the recipient of the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography, as well as the 2004 National Book Critics Circle Award. The author spent almost 20 years researching the life of Khrushchev in preparation to write the book. Extensive research was made possible through access to archives in Russia and the Ukraine, which was opened to the public following the collapse of the Soviet Union. In addition to printed materials and documentation, he spent time engaging Khrushchev's children and extended relatives, resulting in over 70 personal interviews. Taubman presents a historical narrative and study of the life of Nikita Khrushchev, the Soviet leader who succeeded Joseph Stalin. The book concludes with Khrushchev's death on September 11, 1971.

Numerology The numerical value of Khrushchev in Chaldean Numerology is: 6 Pythagorean Numerology Khrushchev in Iowa | Humanities Khrushchev in Iowa The Garst family welcomes Nikita Khrushchev in 1959 (Roswell Garst, center; Khrushchev, third from right). Photo by Joe Munroe Coon Rapids, Iowa, was crawling with spies. It was September 23, 1959, the day that Soviet Premier Nikita S. Khrushchev came to town to visit his friend, seed corn salesman Roswell Garst, and to witness cutting-edge American agricultural technology. The event drew hundreds of reporters and thousands of curiosity-seekers eager to catch a glimpse of the world’s leading Communist. “The father of a friend of mine said that everyone I saw around Coon Rapids wearing a tie who I didn’t know was a spy,” says Liz Garst, Roswell’s granddaughter who was eight years old at the time.

“I spent a lot of time checking out the cool spies on Main Street.” Fifty years later, Liz and her sister Rachel are helping to remember that day with a three-day celebration titled “Khrushchev in Iowa.” William Taubman, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning biography Khrushchev: The Man and His Era, kicks off the event with a talk on August 27 at Drake University in Des Moines. Following is a conference at the Hotel Fort Des Moines the next day, and a number of activities in Coon Rapids on Sunday, August 29. It’s a chance to commemorate what some historians see as the first thaw in the Cold War. If so, some credit must go to Roswell Garst, a man who, Liz says, “made the world very interesting.” “My grandfather thought he could do anything he wanted,” Liz said. “He was the sort of guy who would write the Pope letters or get on the train to yell at the secretary of agriculture. He thought that what he said could influence things.” His big chance came through an unusual combination of factors. Khrushchev had a problem: how to help the Soviet Union feed itself.

He concluded that his country needed a corn belt and set about learning more about American agriculture. A series of exchanges between the U.S. and the Soviet Union were arranged. Garst ended up showing the head of one Soviet delegation his farm and seed company in Coon Rapids, and in return was asked to visit the Soviet Union. During the trip, he and Khrushchev met and hit it off. “Not only did Khrushchev learn much from Garst about growing corn, he liked him no end as a person,” says Taubman. “Both men loved to gab. Khrushchev relished Garst’s cantankerousness, especially when it justified his own, such as when Garst bawled out Soviet farmers for sowing corn without fertilizing the soil.” Some Americans criticized Garst for trading with the enemy, and some claimed he was a Communist. Liz says her grandfather was simply a good capitalist who was doing what was right for business. The Khrushchevs landed in the United States on September 15, 1959. Their twelve-day trip included stops in New York, Washington, D.C., Los Angeles, and Camp David.

Garst was the only individual the premier met with besides President Eisenhower. Press coverage of the trip stirred excitement among the Soviet people, including Humanities Iowa board president Valentina Fominykh, who, as a child in Kazakhstan, remembered the pictures of Iowa cornfields as being “spectacular.” But Khrushchev was never able to replicate those cornfields back home. Perhaps a greater legacy is the power of the individual to make a difference. “Roswell represented the first thaw in the Cold War,” Liz says. “He did it through the force of his will. We’re hoping that focusing on this anniversary will help young people to hear that message.” -- Michael Knock Family and work for starters, according to a new TV documentary. By Vincent J. Cannato Was the den mother of modernism a fascist? By Barbara Will Andrew Jackson stares down the national bank and wins. By Daniel Feller Even toward the end of her life, the writer revealed a youthful zest for life and art.

By Danny Heitman Before writing a single book, Bento de Spinoza was considered a dangerous thinker By Steven Nadler Khrushchev | Define Khrushchev at Dictionary.com Khrushchev [kroo sh-chef, -chawf, kroosh-; Russian khroo-shchyawf] /ˈkrʊʃ tʃɛf, -tʃɔf, ˈkruʃ-; Russian xruˈʃtʃyɔf/ Spell 1. Nikita S(ergeyevich) [ni-kee-tuh sur-gey-uh-vich;; Russian nyi-kyee-tuh syir-gye-yuh-vyich] /nɪˈki tə sɜrˈgeɪ ə vɪtʃ;; Russian nyɪˈkyi tə syɪrˈgyɛ yə vyɪtʃ/ (Show IPA), 1894–1971, Russian political leader: premier of the U.S.S.R. 1958–64.

Dictionary.com Unabridged Examples from the Web for Khrushchev Expand Contemporary Examples Khrushchev told Lippmann there had to be an all-German peace treaty that included a new status for Berlin. Historical Examples He was not one who would say Khrushchev said this, therefore it is right. Warren Commission (9 of 26): Hearings Vol. IX (of 15) The President's Commission on the Assassination of President Kennedy Khrushchev, energetic manager of what the first two had built. Combat Dallas McCord Reynolds He gave me the impression that he seemed to favor President Kennedy more than he did Khrushchev in his statement. Warren Commission (10 of 26): Hearings Vol. X (of 15) The President's Commission on the Assassination of President Kennedy Khrushchev then became the object of violent attacks in the Albanian press, being castigated as more of a revisionist than Tito. Area Handbook for Albania Eugene K. Keefe Apparently he was more friendly to Castro than he was for instance to Khrushchev, I am using those in broad terms.

Khrushchev - definition of Khrushchev by The Free Dictionary Khrushchev - definition of Khrushchev by The Free Dictionary Also found in: Thesaurus , Encyclopedia , Wikipedia . Khru·shchev (kro͝osh′chĕf, -chôf, KHro͞o-shchyôf′), Nikita Sergeyevich 1894-1971. Soviet politician who served as first secretary of the Communist Party (1953-1964) and Soviet premier (1958-1964). He denounced Stalin (1956), thwarted the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, and improved his country's image abroad but was deposed (1964) for his perceived weakness in dealing with the West and his failure to improve the Soviet economy. Khrushchev

Question: What was Khruschev's first name?
Answer: NIKITA